Blog Saturation? Is it still bleeding edge?

At work we do a bit of blogging. My boss still doesn’t really grasp the concept of what a blog is, but now he wants to host blogs for a niche group. The problem is, he doesn’t think anyone knows what a blog is and doesn’t want to use the word “blog” in the title. Perhaps in the tagline.

It seems to me “blog” is reaching saturation. It was the word of the year last year and there are just to many people blogging for people not to know. But the real question I guess is really do they know that the word “blog” is what kind of sites they’ve been seeing a lot of lately. With the popularity of MSN Spaces, Blogger.com, Typepad and others, is the word “blog” that important in letting people know that’s what we are offering?

In the next few weeks we’ll be rolling it out and I was just wondering how important the word “blog” is to the branding of “blog hosting” and describing what it is.

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The saturation may come from the desire of being up to date for the sake of being on the cutting edge. Since it’s an “in” word, everybody uses it or gets one, just because it’s cool.

Many of us have blogs because we truly appreciate the communication doors it opens. My own personal life has been blessed by the blogosphere. Many deep conversations and cyberfriendships have come as a result of being an active blogger.

So I chose to use “my Christian journey” instead of “my blog” for my blog’s title. I’m not that interested in the name, but in the experience of it.

When you’ve been around something for a while, it tends to become old hat. But there are still tons of newbies out there who ask, “What’s a blog?” Keep in mind there are many small business owners out there who are just now starting an email newsletter. They’ll be way behind the curve when it comes to blogs.

What you call it depends on your audience or target market, whichever the case may be. You may be asking the wrong people — we all know what a blog is. Ask them. Heck, for starters you might even want to have a contest for your target market to name it. It could generate some good publicity and interest and get the ball rolling for you..

Many of my family members do not know what a blog is, or how it can be used at all. The ones that do know think of it as a journal that anyone can read and are annoyed/worried about it and think that sharing personal details is absolutely horrible.

I tend to look at the word blog in a really broad sense that its inclusive of a lot of sites based on their CMS as opposed to strictly their content so in that regard I’d apply “blog” to your project, and of course in that regard different people have different ideas of the word, but I’d argue in saying that blog is still a minority term, I think that for anyone in the US who does more than just their banking on the internet will have a rough idea as to what a blog is, even if there are probably thousands of different variations on the theme

We sometimes forget that the blogosphere is a rarified world to many of those people who, reportedly, don’t know who the Prime Minister is or think George Bush is a cartoon fox. If you don’t spend more than an hour a week online you are probably ignorant about blogs. The cutting edge is always a lonely planet.